Serves 'em right

U.S. Cities Urged to Adopt 'Congestion Tax' By Terence Chea. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone,

...told dozens of world mayors that they could unclog city streets and fight global warming by charging hefty fees for driving in congested areas of their communities.

It sounds like a great idea to me, but I don't think Americans will accept it. Coincidentally, America's great headache points out

"Long queues at restaurants or theatre box-offices are seen as signs of success," says Brian Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. He thinks congestion "is an inevitable by-product of vibrant, successful cities". The examples of Paris, London and New York all show he has a point.

Not everyone thinks so.

Hence the search for remedies—each of which comes with its own problems. More public transport?

It's not only expensive.

Public transport works well when there is a central hub—like Manhattan. But the Californian sprawl is "multimodal": it works on the basis that everybody can go everywhere...

Driving alone explains why car-pool lanes have a limited appeal. High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes stretch for a mere 1,112 miles of California's freeway system—and are often virtually empty. One idea is Mr Schwarzenegger's decision, still awaiting federal approval, to let fuel-efficient hybrid cars use the HOV lanes whether they have passengers or not.

In the end, virtually all the solutions involve making drivers pay. More realistic fuel prices would make a difference....

Road-pricing has been a little more successful... High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes...allow single drivers to drive on them for an extra fee—with the toll collected electronically and varying according to the level of congestion.

Early criticism...was that a HOT lane amounted to a "Lexus lane", favouring the wealthy solo mogul over the blue-collar pick-up-truck driver. In practice, it has worked out more democratically. Mr Taylor says 250,000 drivers have bought the transponders needed for the electronic billing system, and they use them—rich and poor alike—when speed is important.

The paradox, say the sceptics, is that HOT-lanes, like HOV-lanes, may actually increase car use: by freeing up extra capacity on the freeways, they allow more cars to use them. Nonetheless, simply to get at least some people from A to B quickly, it would surely be sensible to make more HOT-lanes available.

Another scheme being mooted in San Francisco is to imitate London and impose a congestion charge on drivers who enter the central area of the city. Jake McGoldrick, chairman of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, calls this "a home run": it would relieve congestion, lessen pollution and provide money for public transport. Unfortunately, there are relatively few other American cities with the public transport systems in place to follow the London example—and voter opposition would be a near-certainty.

In some cases, fighting congestion does not mean Californians coming up with ingenious ways to prevent it, so much as stopping doing things that encourage it. Donald Shoup and Michael Manville, colleagues of Mr Taylor at UCLA, point to the way that Los Angeles requires both office and residential buildings to provide parking spaces for their tenants. Whereas New York and San Francisco have strict limits on parking in their central business districts, Los Angeles "pursues a diametrically opposing path"...

California is a car culture—as is most of suburban America. Congestion is the inevitable result. Politicians could reduce that congestion by charging motorists more for the petrol they guzzle and the roads they use. But it will only be a change at the margin. Californians have the traffic they deserve.